


home is whenever i'm with you

by storytellingape



Category: A Dog Year (2009), Logan Lucky (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Farm/Ranch, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 08:49:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13431198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storytellingape/pseuds/storytellingape
Summary: The farm was a bit of a fixer upper, but Anthony had always believed, like his mom used to say sometimes, that all you really needed to make things brand new again was a little bit of spit shine and some duck tape. The rest of the time you hoped for the best.





	home is whenever i'm with you

**Author's Note:**

> I listened to a lot of Tom Petty while writing this (lol) but the title is from Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros though I am quite partial to [this cover](https://soundcloud.com/adrian-bliss-2/tom-rosenthal-home-cover) by Tom Rosenthal. This has been written for [@chestnut_nest](https://twitter.com/chestnut_nest) with happy yodels of support from [@martianReihiko](https://twitter.com/martianReihiko), my twin. 
> 
> So to explain Domhnall's character in this, he's a friendly farm...boy who helps Clyde settle into the new house/farm he's just bought, which mirrors the basic plot of A Dog Year (sans the actual doggo). Here's a [nice little four minute clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXuiLpjavBs) for reference. And [here's a screen cap thread that may have gone overboard](https://twitter.com/softgingertwink/status/954597108006334465) featuring Anthony Armstrong - Domhnall Gleeson's character.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The farm had been empty for years, gone derelict with abandon, when Clyde Logan appeared from the woodwork and upended all their lives. He was an army veteran, did a couple tours in Afghanistan, and had lost his hand in some sort of bizarre freak accident during his deployment. He bought the farm up the hill, largely because no one wanted it, and partly, Anthony thought, because it overlooked the rest of town, those few houses staggering unevenly down the valley in gray little flanks. 

No one bothered to see him in those first few weeks though there was talk for a while after some folks had seen the moving van trudging up the hill. New blood always drew attention in these parts but the first time Anthony saw him had been months after Clyde had moved, down at the hardware store when he was standing in front of a shelf of pruning shears, hat pulled low to shade his face. His hair was long up to his shoulders and scraggly, and he was tall, taller even than Anthony himself who stood out even as a kid all lanky and lean and awkward with too big hands and feet. He was wide too, in the shoulders, built like the hull of a ship. 

Anthony tried not to stare at his prosthetic arm, the unnatural rigid shape of it peeking from the sleeve of Clyde’s corduroy jacket. The next time he saw him again Clyde was eating breakfast by himself at the diner, reading from the morning paper which he had folded into sections and was holding up with his good hand. The waitress, Macy, whom Anthony had gone to high school with and who had once made fun of his buck teeth in seventh grade, went over to Clyde’s table to refill his coffee. Anthony watched them from the counter where he was hunched over a plate of greasy eggs and bacon, pretending he was anything but listening to their conversation, the slow drag of Clyde’s vowels like honey melting into a cup of tea. 

There weren’t many people in the diner, just a couple of old regulars nursing their coffee in the back booths, and Anthony had nothing better to do until he had to pick up Ida from his mom’s. The radio was on in the background, crackling in static pops and bursts in between playing old familiar tunes. Macy laughed at something Clyde had said, throwing her head back, and then walked away taking the coffee pot with her. Clyde stayed seated in his booth well into the lunch hour, finishing his paper though it looked like he wasn’t really reading it anymore, just staring out the window with a faraway look on his face. People came and went, the bell above the door jingling and jangling constantly. A few times, Clyde had even seemed agitated by the noise, twitching in his seat before curling his good hand in a fist on the table top. Anthony continued to watch him, and then remembered he had to pick up his daughter and left.

The next day Anthony caught Clyde as he was walking up the hill, following the rutted road that snaked a path up the farm. Anthony slowed his pickup to a stop and rolled down the window, introducing himself before asking Clyde how he liked life up at the farm. It had sat unused for almost half a decade, and the little house that accompanied it had aged along with it, the windows broken or boarded up with plywood, the wood rotting in places and shedding paint. Part of the roof had sagged like the spine of an aging horse, and smashed tiles littered the ground overgrown with weeds. 

It was a bit of a fixer upper, but Anthony had always believed, like his mom used to say sometimes, that all you really needed to make things brand new again was a little bit of spit shine and some duck tape. The rest of the time you hoped for the best. Thinking of Clyde up there, alone in his big old farm house, with his leaky ceiling and broken fence, and his empty chicken coops, made something in Anthony seize up. It was the same feeling he got when he used to play little league: excitement lodged in his rib, his heart thudding in his ears, everything hinging on a single moment, a single act.

“If you ever need an extra pair of hands,” he said to Clyde that afternoon, regretting the words almost immediately as he said them. “I can fix anything.” And this was true, at least to some extent: Anthony was good with his hands, able to tinker and fix almost anything he set his mind to. Broken taps, leaky radiators. He was the kind of guy who helped people change their tires. But Anthony didn’t wait for Clyde to respond; just drove off and left him flabbergasted, watching Clyde’s form shrink from view in the rearview mirror, his palms soaking sweat on the wheel. He was afraid he’d spooked Clyde, that he seemed like he was coming on to him, and was anxious all throughout the evening while he made Ida’s dinner. 

Anthony showed up anyway at Clyde’s house the next day with his uncle’s tools and everything he needed piled in the back of his truck. Clyde was in the yard trying his level best to get the lawn mower going to limited success. He looked pathetic, standing out there missing a hand like that, his jeans flecked with mud, his hair pulled back from his face with a bobby pin. Anthony had called out to him like they were friends and Clyde looked surprised to even see him out there on his property, trespassing more like though Clyde wasn’t mean about it or rude and didn’t run him off the farm like Anthony expected he was going to. Instead, he let Anthony have at the lawn mower, watched him as he worked and showed Clyde where he thought he needed new posts for his fences as the old ones had rotted off, the foundations weakened by days of rain and nascent summers. 

Afterwards, Clyde invited him for lunch which consisted of cornbread stuffed with ham and cheese, which he made himself and cooked on a skillet while Anthony skimmed through the books on Clyde’s shelf — an odd mix of authors whose names he couldn’t say without embarrassing himself but recognized from tenth grade English. 

Later they sat on the back porch, knocking back a few beers, listening to the idle buzz of birds and cicadas hiding in the long grass in the yard, the sun bleeding the sky pink. The breeze was mild enough to stop the air from scorching. It was a beautiful summer. They toasted to that.

When Anthony drove home, he felt light-headed the entire time though he only had one beer and didn’t consider himself drunk. It was a strange feeling that never went away even after he’d fallen asleep. 

That was months ago. 

 

Nowadays Clyde’s house looked more like himself: a little put together after the walls had been coated with a fresh layer of paint. The furniture was all secondhand but cozy enough, from the hunter green sofa with a sag in the middle to the soft woven rugs which had been a housewarming gift from Clyde’s sister Mellie. Sometimes, when Clyde was in a talkative mood, which was often after two shots of whiskey, he talked about his family: Mellie who worked at a hair salon despite being the town beauty; his brother Jim who had a shot at playing for the major leagues until he busted his knee during an off-season. He said his family was plagued by a hundred year old curse, which sounded ridiculous until Clyde told Anthony what had happened to his parents: right when any of them seemed to have everything within their reach, fate dealt them an ugly hand. Anthony often felt like that himself, with a kid at twenty-two and having never left town to see the world. 

He was going to travel, and _do things,_ but then Ida happened, on the one night he was dumb enough to pretend that what he didn’t already know about himself was true all along. He was lucky Ida’s mom had been a friend of his, though she left him as soon as she could, moving out of state to get a degree, never returning his calls. Now all his plans were shot to hell and he was still here, unmoved like a stone, year in and year out unchanged by the ebb and flow of things until — _until_ Clyde, Clyde with the slow laugh that warbled low in his throat, Clyde with the tattoo on the pale inside of his forearm, Clyde with the big nose, the thick lips. He always had beer to share with Anthony. He always invited him in for lunch. And he was kin to Anthony in a way he was only realizing. 

*

Anthony liked coming over to Clyde’s house in part because he could always raid his fridge. Half the time, he liked how Clyde’s house smelled, garlicky from all the food and a little musty like a coat that hadn’t been used for a time. The den wasn’t cluttered with toys and assorted kid stuff, unlike Anthony’s house, and the kitchen was always neat, with an old pine table scarred with knife marks and a window fringed with potted plants. He had an old TV set up in the living room, and probably it came with the house. 

It resembled something Anthony’s grandparents used to have with the dials set into a panel next to the screen. Clyde watched a lot of old movies, the black and white ones with the audio warped and un-mastered so that the volume had to be turned up way high for the dialogue to be understood. The TV couldn’t even be hooked up to a DVD player or cable, which Anthony thought was dumb, but maybe Clyde liked it that way. Maybe that was the point.

A stint in the military skewed you a little, more so if you lost your hand in an explosion that should have killed you. As a result Clyde was a little off-kilter, slow to respond, but sometimes quickly agitated. Anthony had witnessed this firsthand. 

He came over so frequently he had a spare key to the front door. He helped mostly with the yard work, hauling old furniture out on the lawn, teaching Clyde where it was best to plant tomatoes, where the ground would allow it. Sometimes he walked in on Clyde cooking breakfast, or watching those old movies on TV again, or folding laundry in great big heaps like Anthony’s mom used to do, not clothes even but blankets and pillowcases which he hung to dry on a washing line in the yard. He’d put it up himself without any help from Anthony, and had called him over the afternoon he finally had it up, pride in his voice slurred by liquor as he stood in front of the dripping clothesline where his washing hung and furled like sails.

“You did good Clyde Logan,” Anthony said and meant it.

Clyde laughed and dipped his head bashfully, smiling that slow sweet smile that made Anthony feel the brunt of the summer heat sear all the way through the center of him, knocking his knees. 

“It’s nothing,” Clyde said. “Just me bein’ stupid. Couldn’t get the dryer to work.”

“It’s better to dry your clothes like this anyway,” Anthony said. “Keeping it real.”

“Keepin’ it — _keepin’ it real?_ ” He laughed, and Anthony shrugged and felt his ears burn.

Sometimes, Anthony walked in on Clyde dozing on the sofa, just in his undershirt so his missing hand was in full view. It unnerved Anthony to see it, the empty space where a hand was supposed to be, mostly because he stopped noticing it wasn’t there a long time ago. Clydeslept fitfully, the sleep of the weary, his face twitching. His normally soft hair looked strangled and twisted. Anthony touched it gently so he didn’t wake him. Clyde had left the television on so that a ghostly glow lit him in intermittent blue flashes. Anthony turned the TV off, then turned it on again when Clyde made a noise, protesting against the silence. 

“It’s okay,” Anthony whispered, though he had no idea why he was saying any of this to a sleeping Clyde. “It’s okay. Just sleep.”

Anthony watched him for a while, then put away the dishes in the sink. Then he left and drove home.

*

The first time it happened, Anthony had almost fought Clyde off. It was inevitable; if the neighbors weren’t talking, then they would be now, because Anthony spent whatever free time he had at Clyde’s and often times never felt like leaving. They weren’t even doing anything worth talking about — at least not at first. Anthony wasn’t even sure he liked Clyde like that, only that he thought about Clyde’s knees a lot, and the hair on his legs that Anthony sometimes felt when he hoisted himself off the sofa and boosted himself up with one palm pressed to Clyde’s knee. That didn’t mean anything: even when Clyde smiled at all of his jokes, including the terrible ones, even if he was the only one he could stand Ida’s tantrums. 

Clyde had been the first one to kiss him, one sullen afternoon when they’d just finished lunch, coffee spiking his breath as he held Anthony against the fridge, kissing him once, and then again after Anthony had buckled against him, deflating like a balloon as his arms sagged against his sides, so weak to affection that he’d let Clyde fuck him three days later, right on the sofa, with Anthony’s toes pointing up to the ceiling and his shirt hiked up to his ribs. He thought they were going to break the sofa from how hard Clyde was fucking him, like he couldn’t get enough of it and wanted to make a home for himself inside of him. It hurt, but felt good in an inexplicable way; it made Anthony feel sexy for the first time in life, wanted, desired, all these things he never let himself think he was while his skin burnt from the long hours he spent under the sun, ploughing the hard earth, driving his parent’s tractor, cleaning pig shit. 

Clyde fucked him another time after, before he could go home that afternoon, bent over the kitchen sink with his good hand fisted in the back of Anthony’s shirt, keeping him in place so his dick rammed home every time. Anthony wasn’t even out of his pants; they puddled around his ankles on the wide-board hardwood floor, limiting his movement when all he wanted to do was to spread his legs to make an even wider berth. He could see his reflection in the spotted window, the hair matting his forehead and covering his eyes, the way he bowed his back. Clyde’s face clenched in concentration; he was biting his lip hard. 

“Darlin’,” Clyde groaned into Anthony’s neck, never mind that Anthony probably smelled like hay and sawdust. “Anthony,” he finally said. Only Clyde had ever said his name like a prayer.

*

Anthony came the fourth time they fucked, a month deep into one of the coldest winters they’ve ever experienced. Clyde had dragged him up by the hips so that he was seated in his lap, impaled fully on his dick Anthony’s knuckles bled white from how hard he was gripping Clyde’s shoulders. 

Clyde was big, and thick, everything Anthony had already expected of him, and Anthony rode him steady and slow so he could feel it in the weeks afterward when he had to drive all the way to Baton Rogue to visit family for Christmas. 

The bed creaked under their combined weight; the headboard knocked against the wall. It was like a porno Anthony had furtively watched as a teenager, complete with the theatrics, the mattress squeaking now and again, every breath punched out of him shaping around a sigh. There were clothes everywhere on the floor and Anthony had forgotten to remove his socks. He could hear the slap of their bodies punctuating every thrust. 

The sheet slid off his hips and he could see where their bodies where connected, the wiry thatch of hair covering Clyde’s crotch, his own dick an angry red curve that bobbed with every cant of his hips. It felt good, having Clyde inside of him. He liked it. Even more so when Clyde leaned up on his elbows to kiss him, open-mouthed and dirty, pressing his good hand against the small of Anthony’s back to buoy him forward into gravity. After Anthony had come, Clyde licked his stomach clean, then gave it to him the way he really needed it which was: hard and fast. Anthony spread his thighs and opened himself up for him, hands under his knees, the way he knew people did it in pornos. 

Clyde came with a growl, collapsing on top of him like a deck of cards. Then he pulled out and patted Anthony on the thigh, eyes closed as he caught his breath in deep heaving pulls. “That was just lovely,” he said. “Thank you.” Like Anthony had made him a full course dinner and Clyde hadn’t just fucked him so hard Anthony was gonna have trouble standing for a few days. Anthony couldn’t help it; he started to laugh.

*

“I had a dream about you, you know,” Anthony said one day, still delirious from having Clyde’s mouth in a place it shouldn’t be. He’d already showered and felt relatively clean enough, but it had only been half an hour since Clyde had had him bent over the back of the sofa so he was still feeling a little malleable. Sex did that to him, made him clumsy and stupid. But he was no one special; it did that to everyone. 

“Hm?” hummed Clyde softly. “You dreamt about me?”

“Uh-huh,” said Anthony. They were in the backyard, lounging on lawn chairs set under the shade, a cooler of beer between them, not touching, not holding hands, not even looking at each other. 

Anthony’s eyes were closed. He could feel the sun on his face. 

“Well,” Clyde said slowly. “You wanna tell me what that was about?”

Anthony couldn’t even begin describing it. He couldn’t remember most of what he’d dreamt about, only that it made him feel dazed afterwards, motionless on his side of the bed and blinking dumbly in the dark. What Anthony remembered most of all was the red haze over everything, snow falling fast, the ground shaking with angry tremors. There was a body in the snow, so far away it was only a speck in the horizon, black and red but Clyde’s unmistakably. Anthony would know, would recognize him anywhere even with his hands closed over his eyes.

“It was like some Star Trek bullshit,” Anthony said, “We were in space, I think. Anyway, it’s stupid.”

“What do you think it means?” Clyde asked. 

Anthony glanced at him, shrugged. “Could mean anything.”

“Hmm,” said Clyde thoughtfully. He sipped his beer in the same fashion, not saying anything, his profile lit by the sun that was slowly starting to set and throwing shadows across his face. Anthony felt stupid, sharing his dream, so he didn’t say anything for a while, sinking back in his seat. He fell asleep without meaning to, and when he woke with a start, dusk was settling all around him, the sky rosy with striations of late afternoon light. Next to him, Clyde had gone, and seemed to have taken the cooler with him. There was a soft dent on the grass where it once sat. 

Anthony looked up when he heard the screen door bang open behind him. Clyde had changed out of his shirt and was wearing a raggedy tank with some band’s name in front. “Hey beautiful,” he said. “You awake yet?”

“Yeah,” Anthony yawned. Before Clyde, no one had called him beautiful before, and he doubted he was ever getting used to it until he stopped looking like someone’s funny younger brother with skinny arms and a soft middle and bright orange hair. 

“I’m up, I’m up. Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You looked so peaceful sleepin’, couldn’t bear to disrupt your sleep. You stayin’ for dinner? I was thinkin’ spaghetti and meatballs.”

Anthony laughed. “Fancy.”

“Well you’re a fancy man,” Clyde said, then he smiled, the smile that got Anthony into this mess in the first place, slow and sweet. Anthony bit his lip and then Clyde swooped down to kiss him, bracing himself on the back of Anthony’s seat with his good hand.

Sometimes Anthony wondered where this strange tenderness for Clyde stemmed from but then Clyde kissed him and he remembered: some people just feel like home.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
